CO-CREATE aims to reduce childhood obesity and its co-morbidities by working with adolescents, to create, inform and disseminate obesity-preventive evidence-based policies. The project applies a systems approach to provide a better understanding of how factors associated with obesity interact at various levels. The project focus on adolescence as the specific target group, a crucial age with increasing autonomy and the next generation of adults, parents and policymakers, and thus important agents for change. CO-CREATE involve and empower adolescents and youth organizations to foster a participatory process of identifying and formulating relevant policies, deliberating such options with other private and public actors, promoting relevant policy agenda and tools and strategies for implementation. CO-CREATE strengthen interdisciplinary research and have an inclusive multi-actor approach with involvement of academics, policy makers, civil society, relevant industry and market actors to ensure long-lasting implementation of the results. The project reflects and builds on a number of existing initiatives and platforms, including the extensive research activity from consortium members. The project has a strong gender profile and consider the relevance of geographic, socio-economic, behaviour and cultural factors. CO-CREATE engages international partners from different policy-contexts in Europe, Australia, South Africa and the US. Applying large-scale datasets, policy monitoring tools, novel analytical approaches and youth involvement will provide new efficient strategies, tools and programmes for promoting sustainable and healthy dietary behaviours and lifestyles. The generated knowledge and innovative tools for assessing actual policy implementation, strategies for empowering adolescents; and strategies for identifying, implementing and monitoring relevant policy programmes are applicable to stakeholders involved in the European efforts to tackle childhood obesity.

Advanced liver diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are major challenges for global health. HCC is the second leading and fastest rising cause of cancer death worldwide. Viral and metabolic liver disease are the main risk factors for HCC, which nearly always arises in advanced liver fibrosis. For metabolic liver disease approved therapies are absent. Cure or suppression of viral infection cannot eliminate the HCC risk in patients with advanced fibrosis. Despite significant progress, therapeutic options for established HCC are still limited in efficacy and safety. Importantly, patient survival in HCC is dependent on the underlying fibrotic liver disease which is not targeted by approved HCC therapies. Addressing these unmet medical needs, FIBCAN aims to identify urgently needed targets for prevention and treatment of fibrosis-driven liver cancer. A key focus of FIBCAN will be the investigation of Claudin-1 as a previously undiscovered target for prevention and treatment of fibrosis-driven HCC. Our own data obtained in patient-derived model systems and tissues provide solid evidence that Claudin-1 is implicated in liver fibrosis and hepatocarcinogenesis, and overall and liver-specific patient death. To discover novel targets, we will apply a liver disease discovery platform modeling the clinical cell circuits of cirrhotic patients progressing to HCC combined with single cell RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics of patient tissues. Proof-of-concept studies of target-specific compounds combined with biomarker discovery in cutting-edge patient-derived model systems will deliver novel strategies for further clinical development. A strong collaboration with pharma will lead to rapid translation of the FIBCAN program into the clinic. By delivering urgently needed therapeutic strategies for advanced liver disease and HCC, this proposal will have a marked impact on the management and outcome of patients with advanced liver disease in Europe and beyond.

Background: Many cutting-edge therapies rely on manipulating the adaptive immune system, which has evolved a vast diversity (repertoire) of immune receptors to recognize and remove pathogens and cancer cells. The sequence-data sets characterizing this Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (i.e., AIRR-seq data) have the potential to revolutionize vaccine research and the development of therapies against autoimmune diseases and cancer; however, AIRR-seq data are typically stored and curated by individual labs, using a variety of tools and technologies. Sharing these data in a common way across disease studies, labs, and institutions around the world will improve our ability to recognize patterns in basic research and clinical trials, and increase our confidence in these patterns. The existing iReceptor Platform uses community-developed standards to facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data by enabling queries across a system of distributed data repositories. Project: The iReceptor Plus consortium of researchers from Europe and Canada will address several key challenges to optimally sharing AIRR-seq data among public and industrial partners: protecting patient privacy and the intellectual property of partners, performing complex analyses on data brought together from many sources, and expanding the size and number of repositories that can be integrated in the network. Impact: The iReceptor Plus project will facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data among multiple institutions, including biopharmaceutical companies and researchers working with human confidential data, across multiple diseases, treatments and populations. This will lead to a better understanding of the causes of infectious and autoimmune diseases and cancer, which can lead to early detection and suggest novel therapies. These improvements will reduce the social and economic burden of these diseases, advance Europe and Canada’s leadership role in immunotherapy, and contribute to improved patient care worldwide